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Planet PHP FAQ

Someone asked us per email: "How are blogs selected for Planet PHP? ". So here's a little FAQ about that. I'll put that later somewhere on Planet PHP, just too lazy right now.

* Who's behind it?

Mainly Tobias Schlitt and me. The PHP Group has nothing to do with it.

* How are blogs selected for Planet PHP?

There's no real policy behind it. If we find an interesting blog or someone sends us one, then we have a look at it, and if it has unique content or is a well-known php-developer, we add it. We're not very picky, but prefer personal blogs over project blogs and blogs of people, we heard before over complete strangers ;)

We also usually just take PHP related content from those blogs. This generally means, that we aggregate the PHP category feed of it, as the usual Planet PHP reader is not interested in the well-beings of your cat ;) Most weblog software supports that nowadays.

* Can you put the author names to the title in the RSS feeds?

Use the RSS 0.92 feed, it has the author name in the title field, the other 2 feeds use the dc:creator field. For a more detailed discussion of this, see another blog post by me.

* How can I add my blog to planet php?

Use the submit form, with the link to your blog and to your PHP related and valid RSS feed. Feedvalidator.org is a pretty good feed validator, btw. If you don't hear anything back from us within some days, just send it again. Sometimes some mails just get lost in the INBOXes...

* X published Y on Planet PHP, which has nothing to do with PHP.

So what? First, it really happens not often, so we can definitively live with that. And second, we don't have controls over the authors and we do really not want to check posts all the time and delete the ones, which may offend or bore people.

* How does it work?

We have a list of RSS Feeds. A custom script - with the help of MagpieRSS - checks them every half hour and inserts any new posts into our database, which is then displayed with the help of Popoon (therefore no need to check Planet PHP more than every half hour ;))
and some other magic

About the author

Comments [22]

Davey Shafik, 01.06.2005 21:12 CET

Another idea, is to check the permalinks and identify duplicate entries, removing the old one when a latter one is found.

- Davey

chregu, 02.06.2005 09:06 CET

There's no double post problem ;) We check for permalinks and update entries if it already exists. The problem is that sometimes people post the same content with different URLs (eg, they start with it, delete it and write it again later...)

Notice: Undefined index: HTTP_HOST in /www-data/kunden/bitflux/free/cms/tmp/config.inc.php on line 5

not defined
Connection closed by foreign host.

Also, what happens when I search for ' (I mean single ')?
For some reason it doesn't even show "No more entries". And if I search for '' (double ') - it shows this message. Looks like a problem with escaping characters in query.

chregu, 29.06.2005 05:59 CET

Tony: Thanks for the reports. I fixed both (for the first not a real fix, there's now just a message, that we don't support HTTP 1.0, since it's all Virtual Host based...)

tony2001, 29.06.2005 14:35 CET

Yup, works fine now =)
The HTTP/1.0 problem is not a real one, I just wanted to point on the error message (that shouldn't be visible at all IMO).
Thanks.

I think as planet-php grows, both in viewers and blogs aggregated, it might be a nice idea to allow some rudimentary tagging or categorization of the blogs/posts available.

The sheer number of posts can be overwhelming at this point, especially if you're not interesting in a specific topic (a framework or security or whatnot) - would be nice to chop things up a bit (and only get the security feed or framework feed or whatnot) Would also help with those screaming "this isn't php related".

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